


The Frog's Tale

by SegaBarrett



Category: The Well of the World's End (Fairy Tale)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-27 22:43:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10818270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Life in a well is not all it's cracked up to be.





	The Frog's Tale

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bigsunglasses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigsunglasses/gifts).



There was a cruel irony in it, in all of it. 

He had always hated frogs when he had been growing up, though he never had understood entirely why. It wasn’t as if he had been cursed with some sort of traumatic memory involving frogs or anything; he just really disliked them. They were slimy, and they ate flies, and at ten years old that had been really all he needed to know in order to form a whole-heartedly negative view of the whole lot of them.

Until he woke up as one, of course. Then the tables had turned. 

Flies aren’t really all the bad once you get used to them, he consoled himself regularly. But it also isn’t what he pictured the rest of his life looking like. He was going to inherit the kingdom one day, and rule as far as the eye could see.

Right now, his eye could see only bogs and flies and the well. 

He shouldn’t have brushed off the magician, of course, but he couldn’t hold it against himself for two long – he had been a kid. A nasty kid, sometimes, but a kid nonetheless. 

It felt like a lifetime ago. 

The man had been asking him for food. He had knocked at Prince Edward’s door and asked him for anything that he could spare.  
Edward’s parents weren’t home; they had traveled to another kingdom to make peace. They were always doing things like that, always making peace and accords and looking for treasure.

And Edward was ten and angry and sad that his parents weren’t home, again, to play with him and read him stories about faraway lands and daring princes and beautiful princesses.

He had run to the door and hoped that it was his parents, rushing home again for him. That they would tell him that they missed him and how could they leave without telling him? They would wrap him in their arms and tell him he was their good boy, their sweet boy and nothing, no kingdom was more important than him.

Instead, it had just been a stupid ugly old magician.

And he had thrown a rock at him.

The rest… the rest was simply royal history.

***

The first girl had been beautiful. Tall and blonde, with a happy smile that seemed to bounce around her face and make the entire world light up.   
He had only been eleven, but he had fallen in love. The way that boys do, where every look and every glance seems to make the word catch on fire and light even the darkest nights.

She would be the one to break the spell, and he knew it. Knew it, knew it, knew it deep in every corner and crevice. Knew he wouldn’t be eating flies for much longer and would have his head nestled in that beautiful blonde hair before too long.

She must have seen him, too; must have looked down into the well and seen him peeking up at her, too. 

Maybe this would be the moment, his shining moment, everything coming together and everything…

He opened his mouth to sing his song to her, to beckon her close to him, and…

“Ah!” she shrieked. “A frog!”

And went running back into the woods.

He wished he could sigh, but found with disappointment that it is one of the many things that a frog cannot do.

And perhaps making a girl fall in love with him was yet another.

***

It was two years before another girl looked his way. He was wiser now, and older. 

She had long red hair that went down her back, and she was beautiful. 

He would woo her this time – he would tell her what she wanted to here, and he would hold back the information that would make her turn away. It would be so easy that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before.

And so he called from the well and told her he was a prince who had to stay hidden, but he couldn’t tell her why. She seemed giddy at the news; she had been chosen for this. Chosen over so many others. 

He had never really pictured himself growing up and getting married, but he figured that if he had to, this was a good girl to choose. She seemed happy about everything, and she would make him happy too. There hadn’t been a lot of happiness since he became a frog; there hadn’t been a lot of happiness before.

“My darling!” he called up to her. “I need your assistance! I am a magical prince who has been trapped… I cannot come into the light. Not until you heed my words.”

He was proud; he felt like a real prince. 

“A prince?” she had asked. “Where?”

Well, that was one way to start, he figured.

“The prince is hiding… but you can take his envoy…”

“His en-what?”

About that time, it hit the frog that this just wasn’t going to work. He kept trying, however, because when one is a frog, it seems as if they have all the time in the world.

“His frog.”

She peeked over then, into the well, and let out a scream.

***

They called it the Well at World’s End, and it certainly felt like it. It was a quiet well, at the edge of a wood. People didn’t come out there, not usually.

When he had been a little boy – a little prince – they had told him the story of how it had gotten that name. An explorer had been walking through the woods and had been running out of water and food. He had nearly given up hope before he had found the well, and he was so dehydrated that he had begun hallucinating.  
He told his family later that he was sure he was falling off the world when he reached into the well to pull up the water which saved his life. 

When he had been a little boy, he had always wanted to go there. It seemed mystical and far off, so different from the confines of the castle where everything was so monotonous – the same people, the same games, the same life. 

He could picture himself in World’s End all by himself, standing alone as everyone else fell off and fell away. Maybe it really ways the end of the world, the end of days, when he conjured it up in dreams.

Now that he actually lived there, it had lot a lot of its luster but none of its mystery. 

When he was a boy, he imagined that the forest would echo if he laughed there. That the trees would dance in the wind and wiggle their leaves.

That they would cradle him and he could hear the wind whistling a song.

He never heard songs anymore. Only the wind, just the wind. 

Lonely and alone and calling out for someone to help it.

The frog felt sad when he heard it.

***

He was sleeping when he heard the sound of her feet walking through the forest, crunching leaves beneath her feet.

He thought he made it up at first. 

There hadn’t been anyone coming by in a long, long time, after all. It was hard to tell how much time was passing from down here in the well. There was no real way to mark the days, and often no way to even tell light from dark. By the time he made his way up to the top of the well, it may be light, and by the time he made it back down again to drink, it may be dark. 

But it was hard to tell how many light-dark cycles had happened. Maybe he was creating the days; he didn’t know anymore. 

And many times he dreamt of footsteps and pretty eyes. By the time he would get back up again, he always found that the sound had fallen apart in the time it had taken him. No one came to the Well at World’s End anymore.

But here were footsteps, and they sounded real. They had all of the crunch and drag of the real thing, and none of the lilt of dream-steps.

He wasn’t sure until he was nearly at the top and he heard the unmistakable sound of crying. He would have never made that part up; he hated the sound of crying.

He peeked his tiny frog eyes out to see over top of the well. 

There was a tall, spindly girl with wiry brown hair that went down over her eyes. She was sitting with her head in her hands, wailing and sobbing.

The frog wished that she would stop. He waited a long time, but still she cried. 

Eventually, he cleared his throat, letting his tongue dart in and out of his mouth. 

Maybe she would be the one. Probably not, because she looked like a clueless girl, sobbing over a pail of water. 

“I can help you with that.” He tried not to sound smug, but it was hard not to be. Why hadn’t she come to this conclusion on her own?

Then again, she did seem so very sad, sitting there. Maybe that was the reason. Maybe the tears had flooded away her brain until it had been filled with emptiness, like a pail with a hole in it.

He planned to give her his helpful advice, and then his work would be done done – at least she would stop crying and he could go back to waiting for the right girl to come along and break the curse. 

But as he spoke, his bugged-out eyes gazing upon her tear-streaked ones, he couldn’t help but feel a tiny pull of sadness for her.

She was the kind of girl he would have wanted to reach out to, if he was still a boy. And maybe he still was – how many years had passed between then and now? 

The kind of girl he would want to be friends with.

Could a friend break a curse? Or did it have to mean something else, be something else? 

“I’ll tell you my advice – at a price,” he told her. That rhymed…. He smiled to himself. Maybe tonight would be the night.

Maybe, he would let himself hope.

***

The frog had to wonder if parents across the board were a troublesome nuisance.

“Girls must keep their promises,” the stepmother kept telling the girl, and the way she snarled it made the frog want to back out of the whole thing. For if this was the girl, the one who would break the spell and love and cherish him forever, did that mean they may have to live with the stepmother as well? How was that going to work?

He was sure he would rather stay a frog than bear that indignity on top of the rest of it. 

But something made him keep on. He didn’t know what it was – maybe it was some little shred of hope. Or maybe he had begun to feel something for the awkward, gangly girl who seemed to forget everything and tumble about as if breathing sometimes escaped her. What that something was, he wasn’t quite sure. It was something that seemed to start at his gills and work its way up through his throat. 

The stepmother urged her on and on, through what the frog began to regard as a series of the most awkward dance he had ever seen anyone ever do.

And then came the piece at the end, the last request – the one that he was sure the witch had thought he could never ask someone to do, and could never expect someone else to follow through on.

He suddenly felt for the girl, stronger and deeper and cutting right through his ribcage – he was the only friend this girl had ever had, and all he was now was a frog. A frog commanding her to kill him. 

The frog could see her wavering, could see her eyes water and her hands shaking as she picked up the knife.

“Why?” she asked, her voice so low that she could barely hear him.

“I need you to.”

He couldn’t say much more than that, and who knew if it would even work? Maybe it was all a lie, and every time he had allowed himself that tiny shred of hope, he had only been lying to himself. Maybe it was like sticking out his tongue to try and catch flies – maybe they would stick, but he almost hoped they wouldn’t. 

She closed her eyes and sobbed as she swung the knife down.

His heart was breaking as his skin came apart.

***

“It’s such a beautiful castle, isn’t it?”

The serving girl was always gushing about what an honor the whole thing was, how beautiful everything was, how she would kill to be a princess.

His love had done so. 

And she always smiled as she led guests through the castle, every perfect hair in place, a tiara shimmering in the moonlight.

He didn’t say a lot of things to her, most days. 

But he knew she missed the way it was before.

And sometimes he did, too.

“Of course it is,” he told the serving girl, “The most beautiful I’ve ever seen.”


End file.
